What is Sales Automation & Can It Improve Sales Efficiency?

Sales automation solutions first transformed routine and time-consuming sales tasks, such as collecting and updating customer data, minimizing manual labor and reducing the risk of human error. Now, AI-powered automation technologies have significantly widened the applicability and impact of sales automation on sales activities and processes.

Solutions to automate sales processes that include AI technology, and in particular that leverage embedded generative AI, can perform sophisticated pipeline analysis, update customer data, and even generate new content, such as personalized prospecting emails and sales reports. The integration of automation and AI is driving sales process transformation, making sales professionals more efficient and effective, saving time and effort, and delivering insights to assist sales leaders, and the sales organization as a whole, at every step of the sales process.

Ultimately, sales automation provides the means to enhance human capabilities, allowing sales professionals time to focus more on building relationships and closing deals, and less on administrative tasks.

What can sales automation do for me?

Sales automation can drastically improve everything about the sales process for almost any organization. It provides numerous benefits specific to the sales process that are invaluable in the hands of any sales representative. Some of the tasks sales automation can take care of include:

Sales Prospecting

Assess a lead's needs, share information, and share what you learn with the rest of the organization without losing time because you have to compile and send it to each database manually.

Lead Tracking

Keep track of a client's interactions with the company, their buying history, and gain insights so you can send targeted marketing messages and communications.

Instant Communication

Automatically update the rest of the organization about customers in the pipeline with sales automation that updates every important database at once. You can send automated replies, connect with them on social media networks, and complete sales faster.

Identify New Opportunities

Identify the most affordable leads, spot trends, and find opportunities to upsell with AI, Machine Learning (ML), and sales automation. You'll be able to instantly see where the most profitable target markets are and gain information on how best to sell to them.

Efficient Marketing

Sales automation works seamlessly with marketing automation tools to send marketing materials at the moments in the customer lifecycle when they're most likely to be effective.

Increase Sales

Because your sales team won't have to spend hours each day with manual, repetitive administration tasks, they'll have more time to chase leads and make sales. You can even use sales automation to determine quotas and product priorities.

A must read, one-of-its-kind, industry report

Learn how top performers achieve 8.5x ROI on their automation programs and how industry leaders are transforming their businesses to overcome global challenges and thrive with intelligent automation.

Get the Report

Who uses sales automation?

Sales automation has a widespread set of functions and features that appeal to different users and business roles throughout an organization. These include sales team members, managers, upper-level executives, and marketing team members. Each of these roles will use sales automation differently. Some use cases include:

Traditional and Online Businesses

Online and brick-and-mortar stores can both benefit considerably from sales automation. Record customer information, qualifying sales leads, track qualified leads, learn about potential customers. And you can extend the use of automation beyond the sales pipeline, so you can make more sales calls, improve customer satisfaction, and improve your bottom line.

Entrepreneurs and Professionals

Sales requires a significant amount of time that entrepreneurs and professionals don't have. Running email campaigns, remembering to follow up with new contacts, closing deals, finding potential clients, adjusting or looking up pricing, and structuring a sales funnel are just a few time-consuming tasks overloading daily schedules. Sales automation can act like a digital sales professional and an extra set of hands in many ways by taking care of many of these without human intervention.

Sales Managers

Sales automation supports supervisors and managers by providing accurate sales forecasts, detecting trends, and making it easier to capitalize on them. It also gives intelligence and insights into a team member's performance so that you can assign them to the right prospects.

C-Level Executives

A sales automation platform's single dashboard and reporting functions take the work out of devising or adjusting budgets, justifying expenses, and measuring ROI at an enterprise level.

Sales Representatives

Sales representatives spend a significant amount of time on data entry, data management, and using administrative tools. Sales automation streamlines sales processes for faster, more effective results. Recommendations for abridging sales cycles are particularly valuable.

Marketing Representatives

Email marketing tools enable professionals to send highly personalized, template-based messaging to customers segmented according to demographic metrics or AI-enabled micro-segmentation. Sales automation also integrates seamlessly with CRM and social media channels like LinkedIn.

Frequently asked questions about sales automation

What is sales automation?

Sales automation is a simple bot you design and customize to perform specific actions. You can manually start your automated sales bots, set them to run on a schedule, or use a trigger such as an email to run them. Automation scripts can run from a desktop, or you can host them on a server and run them across your organization.

We'd like to try sales automation before rolling it out to the entire company. Is that possible?

Sales automation scripts can do amazing things, but they don't have to be overly complex or adopted company-wide. Start by automating specific email communications, sending marketing material, updating Customer Relationship Management software (CRM), or other daily tasks. You can share bots across the company or only with a select group with just a few clicks.

Does sales automation require a significant investment to benefit from it?

Because RPA sales technology works with the programs, databases, and web pages you already use, you won't need to adopt new software or workflows. While desktop automation is an option, bots run on a server, so you won't have to make significant infrastructure investments. And there's minimal training required, so you can start using it right away.

How do we get the most benefit out of sales automation right away?

Companies often seek to automate large workflows right away, but this isn't always the most beneficial approach. The best way to get the most from automated tools is to identify the most time-consuming, repetitive tasks. Starting with the most work-intensive processes will save the most time, and the change will be easy to measure and adapt to.

We already use Salesforce and other CRM programs. Would we still benefit from sales automation?

Yes. Sales automation works with CRM programs, email, Google Workspace, invoicing software, web forms, desktop programs, custom in-house software, and all the other programs you already use. Sales automation can do it all for you instead of manually inputting information into each of these programs and risk making a human error. So, you can capture data from a customer contact form or email, assign it based on a set of criteria to a sales professional, create or update your CRM, and significantly improve sales productivity.

How do I get started with sales automation?

One of the fastest, easiest, and most affordable ways to get started with sales automation is Robotic Process Automation (RPA). These flexible, hard-working bots require no coding experience to perform all sorts of tasks throughout the business process. Sign up, create the bot, walk through the process, and deploy them to get started. It's that simple.